The central mission of the College of Chemistry is to advance society through education and research, and we have made it our responsibility to fulfill this mission, year in and year out, for more than 140 years.

Our two departments provide fundamental and applied studies of an outstanding caliber. The remarkable breadth and depth of resources available to our students readies them as chemists and chemical engineers to address society’s most urgent 21st-century issues.

College faculty have been leaders at the frontiers of knowledge since 1872. Current pioneering research includes premier programs in catalysis, thermodynamics, chemical biology, atmospheric chemistry, the development of polymer, optical and semiconductor materials, and nanoscience, among others.

The College of Chemistry is consistently ranked as one of the best places on earth to learn, teach, and create new tools in the chemical sciences. This is no accident. It’s the direct result of exceptional scholarship as well as thousands and thousands of donations from our loyal alumni and friends.

With the right technology, the gas station of the future will make its own fuel directly from sunlight, in the process sucking up carbon and producing oxygen. Decades into the future, the same technology could provide fuel and oxygen for the first Martians, and could even be tweaked to produce fertilizer.

In a new study, appearing in the November 2017 issue of Nature Materials, a research team led by UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Chemistry and Physics, Naomi S. Ginsberg, has announced the development and implementation of the most direct method to-date to track the nanoscale process of energy flow that punctuates the initial picoseconds after light absorption in some natural and artificial light harvesting systems. The research results are also available online at the Nature Materials website.

The College of Chemistry is very pleased to announce that Dr. Paula Hammond, Head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT, will present this year’s Dow Chemical lecture series on Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UC Berkeley. The lectures will be held on the Berkeley campus September 18th and 20th.